The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2024

by Bill McKibben

When they bought the Chicago Tribune in 2021, Coppins writes, “The new owners did not fly to Chicago to address the staff, nor did they bother with paeans to the vital civic role of journalism. Instead, they gutted the place.”

And with perhaps the most dramatic sign of the state of the industry, Popular Science, which had just celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2022, ceased publication. Popular Science was bought by the private equity firm Recurrent Ventures in 2021.

They were hotter not than any day in human history, but than any day in much of human prehistory. No members of our species with societies anything like the ones we know have ever lived on an earth so hot.

At the moment, 40 percent of all ship traffic on earth consists solely of shipping coal and oil and gas back and forth around the world to burn. (And the US is the biggest exporter.)

The Post defined its dangerous heat threshold as more than 89.6 degrees Fahrenheit wet-bulb globe temperature, equal to a temperature of 120 degrees on a dry day, or mid-90s temperature on a very humid day. Spending more than fifteen or so minutes beyond that limit, many researchers say, exacts a harsh toll on even a healthy adult; many deaths have occurred at much lower levels.

“Climate change is not a distant threat to health, it’s a current threat to health.”

A study led by scientists at the University of California at Berkeley projects that less than one in ten Pakistani households will have air conditioning in 2030, compared with 25 percent of Indian homes. In the United States, 92 percent of residents had air-conditioned homes as of 2021.